5 pet hates about websites

We all use the internet everyday or nearly so and visit a large number of websites. Some sites provide a good user experience, others not so good, and yet others want to make you get the hell outta there asap. Here is what I hate the most in sites.

1) Sites that pop up a window when you try to close them

Usually the option in the pop-up windows is confusing – click cancel if you want to stay on the page! Sometimes, both options take you back to the site and then you’re forced to close the whole window instead of the tab or use alt+F4. They can be sure I will never visit them ever again knowing that I’ll be stuck on their site.

2) More ads than content

Everyone has come across these sneaky Google Adsense ads squeezed in between paragraphs of contents to confuse users and get them to click on them by mistake to earn the site owner some Adsense revenue. If I am reading an article and have difficulty distinguishing between real content and Adsense ads, being tricked to click on links that are ads, I end up leaving the site because of a poor user experience.

There are many other types of excessive ads on a page, including flashing banners and link ads which look like links but have pop-up ads when a cursor is placed over the link. Intrusive ads are the bane of the internet.

3) Trying to delete a social media account

Have you ever tried to delete a social media account? On many of these sites, there is barely any information on how to do this. The delete button simply does not exist. Some don’t even delete your account, they just make it inactive and keep all your details so that a ‘deleted’ account may be reactivated. Facebook comes to mind. Why do they hang on to you so much? Social media sites just want to be able to increase their member base to seduce advertisers, although half of these members are probably spammers or inactive members who can’t be bothered to hunt for an inexistent delete button.

4) Captcha

A captcha is a random string of characters to copy when creating a new account and is used to fight spam. It wouldn’t be something too hard to do but the characters are usually distorted and hard to read so that you end up mistyping them. If you then go back to enter a new captcha, very often the data you entered have been lost and you find yourself having to enter everything again. It’s meant to deter spammers but it’s users suffering more and more from that and makes for a very poor user experience. After all, spammers wouldn’t enter information manually. In fact, there are now scripts that are able to bypass captchas, leaving us users the only ones to suffer.

5) Excessive personal details asked

We have all come across this. Ever tried to create a new email address? Register on a new site? Create a new account? All these sites want to know your age, your sex, your date of birth, your address. What for? Does the email interface turn pink if you are a woman? Do you get send Viagra offers if you are male and breast enhancement offers if you are a woman? Haven’t all these sites guessed by now that users just make up these unnecessary data? Who wants to give away their address, postcode, age, sex, name and date of birth for an anonymous email address?

It would do well for webmasters and site-owners to think about the usability of their site and how much users like it before putting roadblocks ahead and inciting people to look elsewhere for a better user experience.